The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Religion
The Literary Remains of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Volume 3
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
Literature -- History and criticism
It was scarcely to be expected that the passions of James's age would
allow of this wise distinction between Papists, the intriguing restless
partizans of a foreign potentate, and simple Roman-Catholics, who
preferred the 'mumpsimus' of their grandsires to the corrected
'sumpsimus' of the Reformation. But that in our age this distinction
should have been neglected in the Roman-Catholic Emancipation Bill!
Ib. s. 105.
But this invisible consistory shall be confusedly diffused over all
the kingdom, that many of the subjects shall, to the intolerable
exhausting of the wealth of the realm, pay double tithes, double
offerings, double fees, in regard of their double consistory. And if
Ireland be so poor as it is suggested, I hold, under correction, that
this invisible consistory is the principal cause of the exhausting
thereof.
A memorable remark on the evil of the double priesthood in Ireland.
Ib.
Dr. Bishop, the new Bishop of Chalcedon, is to come to London
privately, and I am much troubled at it, not knowing what to advise
his majesty as things stand at this present. If you were shipped with
the Infanta, the only counsel were to let the judges proceed with him
presently; hang him out of the way, and the King to blame my lord of
Canterbury or myself for it.
Striking instance and illustration of the tricksy policy which in the
seventeenth century passed for state wisdom even with the comparatively
wise. But there must be a Ulysses before there can be an Aristides and
Phocion.
Poor King James's main errors arose out of his superstitious notions of
a sovereignty inherent in the person of the king. Hence he would be a
sacred person, though in all other respects he might be a very devil.
Hence his yearning for the Spanish match; and the ill effects of his
toleration became rightly attributed by his subjects to foreign
influence, as being against his own acknowledged principle, not on a
principle.
Ib. s. 107.
I have at times played with the thought, that our bishoprics, like most
of our college fellowships, might advantageously be confined to single
men, if only it were openly declared to be on ground of public
expediency, and on no supposed moral superiority of the single state.
Ib. s. 108.
That a rector or vicar had not only an office in the church, but a
freehold for life, by the common law, in his benefice.
O! if Archbishop Williams had but seen in a clear point of view what he
indistinctly aims at,--the essential distinction between the nationalty
and its trustees and holders, and the Christian Church and its
ministers. [6]
Ib. s. 111.
I will represent him (the archbishop of Spalato) in a line or two,
that he was as indifferent, or rather dissolute, in practice as in
opinion. For in the same chapter, art. 35, this is his Nicolaitan
doctrine:--'A pluralitate uxorum natura humana non abhorret, imo
fortasse neque ab earum communitate.'
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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